The Lost Sirens by NEW ORDER [REVIEW]

Lost Sirens is a mini-album of eight tracks that have been sitting on ice for seven years – songs that were originally intended for a double-album release of 2005’s Waiting For The Siren’s Call – and probably, unless, Hell freezes over (which is when Bernard croons he’ll stay with you until in the opener “I’ll Stay With You), the last time Peter Hook’s bass work will appear on a New Order record.

Things start off well enough – shiny guitars and Hook bass-lines interplay is New Order-ness – a soaring opener that leaves one in no doubt of who you are listening to. But then things go horribly wrong with the insipid late eighties top forty pop nastiness of Sugarcane. The “why don;t you wake up and stop what you’re doing” chorus actually, for real, sounds like a Spice Girls or S Club 7 song. Unforgivably bad. And, frankly, very hard to recover from.

And they… don’t. Recoil and Californian Grass just struggle to go anywhere really, despite the latter showing some melodic promise – it’s a promise that just falls short of any actual delivery. Shake It Up sounds a bit like a shitty version of Pop Will Eat Itself, who really had their time and place – and that is certainly not as a second-rate carbon-copy in 2012 on a New Order record. It’s just awful.

Then Bernard et all explains “I’ve Got A Feeling” and, listening to it, so have I. It’s called nausea.

This album is a cruel, cruel trick to play on New Order completists.

RATING : NOT RECOMMENDED FOR EARS

I have always struggled with a numerical scale; it feels so finite and arbitrary. So the CHEESE ON TOAST scale looks a little something like this : FREAKIN’ AWESOME / JUST AWESOME / REALLY GREAT / GREAT / GOOD / PRETTY COOL / NOT BAD / COULD BE BETTER / PRETTY BAD, ACTUALLY / NOT RECOMMENDED FOR EARS